The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) predicts that cuts in public spending by the coalition government will push unemployment close to 3 million.

The UK think tank further warned that 50,000 public sector jobs are at risk, estimating that joblessness will reach 2.65 million this year and may be pushed close to 3 million in the second half of 2012 and remain at that level until 2015, a level not seen since the early 1990s.

The cuts in public spending could directly affect public sector staff in the local government, police and schools by 15%, with CIPD suggesting the majority of staff likely to lose their jobs will be women in part-time work or on low wages, since they make up a large proportion of the public sector workforce.

"There is little prospect of real wage growth on average throughout this period and ongoing real wage cuts in the public sector," CIPD chief economic adviser Dr. John Philpott warned.

"This will present a major challenge to a government that aims to reduce the deficit while also alleviating poverty, enhancing social mobility and mending a broken society," he added.

"Although tough fiscal medicine is unavoidable and may boost the UK's long-run economic growth and job prospects, reliance on cuts in public spending rather than tax increases as the primary means of cutting the deficit makes the short-term outlook especially bleak for those individuals and communities already suffering the greatest hardship in society," Dr. Philpott concluded.

Meanwhile, the general secretary of the Trade Unions Congress, Brendan Barber, asserted that, "The risk of a double-dip recession across the UK as a whole is growing - and is now a near certainty in those regions that were worst hit by the recession. The net result could well be that the deficit is hardly dented as tax receipts fall and benefit spending grows."